Title: Big Hero 6 Junior Novelization (Disney’s Big Hero 6)
Author: Irene Trimble
Narrator: MacLeod Andrews
Length: 2h 18m
Format: Audiobook
Age group: 8+
Fourteen-year old Hiro Hamada is brilliant but wastes all his time hustling at ‘bot fights in dark alleys instead of focusing on his future. He worships Tadashi, his older brother, who rescues him from scrapes and encourages him to think bigger. Everything changes when Hiro loses his big brother in a terrible accident at a famous robotics lab where Tadashi was developing a health-care robot named Baymax. Heartbroken, Hiro teams up with Baymax and with 5 of Tadashi’s friends when he realizes that the explosion at the lab may not have been an accident at all. Big Hero 6 recounts their adventures as they transform themselves into a superhero crew to fight a mysterious enemy who has also stolen Hiro’s robotics innovations and threatens their home city of San Fransokiyo.
You may be surprised to hear about Big Hero 6, the audiobook! The movie was of course a huge hit and no doubt your kids, like mine, saw it when it was released. But in our household, that only seemed to increase interest in listening to the audiobook adaptation which followed. Yes, it is Disney, but the audiobook is really well written and read with a beautifully resonant voice by MacLeod Andrews. It explores some fun and relatively sophisticated robotics concepts which may be missed while watching the fast-paced film, and deals sensitively with loss and with the power of friendship. A great find for kids who may be skeptical about the audiobook experience.
Access: The link above is through Audible at Amazon.com. Depending upon where you live in the world, you can likely also access this audiobook for free through your public library and other resources that I am blogging about, like Hoopla.
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